Concepción Mission, Chiquitanía, Bolivia. 

Kate M. Centellas
Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology & International Studies
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
P.O. Box 1848
University, MS 1848 38677-1848

Phone: 662-915-5733
Office: Leavell 116
Email: kmcentel@olemiss.edu

Biography:
I received my BA in biology with a secondary concentration in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1999.  I stayed in Chicago (my original home) for graduate work, receiving my MA in anthropology in 2002 and PhD in 2008, both from the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.  I was awarded a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for my dissertation fieldwork in La Paz, Bolivia from late 2003-early 2005.  After completing my dissertation, I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Delaware, conducting research on interdisciplinary collaboration in multi-institutional research centers.  I joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2009.  I teach courses ranging from introductory anthropology to senior seminars on gender, work, and the politics of science.

Research:
My research examines nationalist bioscientific and biomedical research in contemporary Bolivia and how it relates to indigenous and regional social movements.   I am interested in the politics and practices of science in Bolivia, including how science became a privileged site for Bolivian investment in the midst of a widely discussed social “crisis.”  I start by asking basic questions: as who is doing what in what kind of laboratories and what are their justifications for research?  Many of the people in the laboratories are women from indigenous or poor backgrounds.  I analyze how laboratory spaces became gendered to be “like home” and laboratory work analogized to “cooking” in Bolivia, and the implications of this for the shape and place of bioscience in the national context.  I am also interested in how researchers in Bolivia self-consciously construct a field of “Bolivian science” that is related to yet distinct from both “global” scientific and “indigenous” knowledge.   Future research directions include: politics of higher education in Bolivia; a comparison of aid projects funded by foreign governments and directed toward bolstering laboratory infrastructure; and analysis of the impact of the Morales Administration’s new science and technology promotion legislation on scientists and local communities. 

Recent Publications:
“The Localism of Bolivian Science: Tradition, Policy, and Projects.”  Latin American Perspectives, Special Issue: Bolivia Under Evo Morales, forthcoming.

“Calibrating Translational Cancer Research: Participation Customs and Boundary Object Emergence in Interdisciplinary Laboratory Meetings.”  With Steve Fifield and Regina Smardon.  In process. 

For Love of Land and Laboratory: Nation-Building and Bioscience in Bolivia.  2008.  Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago. 

Recent Conference Presentations:
“Science, Sovereignity, and Social Crisis: The Influence of Bioscientists in Contemporary Bolivia.”  Paper presented at the 4S Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., October 2009. 

“Sociable Biologists: Creating Community Among Bioscientists in La Paz, Bolivia.”  Paper Presented at LASA 2007, Montreal, September 2007.

“Routines Within Chaos: Routines within Chaos: Quotidian Laboratory Practice during the “revolutionary epoch” in Bolivia,” Paper presented at the AAA Annual Meetings, San Jose, CA, November 2006. 

Courses Taught:

ANTH 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
INST 207: Introduction to Latin American Studies
INST 314: Work, Gender, and Kinship in Latin America